Artist Margaret Noble making sound decisions

Artist Margaret Noble records a variety of sounds from music boxes to child toys in her downtown loft to produce sounds for use in her multimedia installation named “44th and Landis” to be held at th Museum of Contemporary Art.

Artist Margaret Noble records a variety of sounds from music boxes to child toys in her downtown loft to produce sounds for use in her multimedia installation named “44th and Landis” to be held at th Museum of Contemporary Art.

About the series

What is the “creative process”? Where does art come from, and how does an artist develop it, from idea to finished artwork?

We’re following San Diego artist Margaret Noble as she considers, creates and constructs “44th and Landis,” a large multimedia work on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego downtown from Aug. 9 to Jan. 20.

We hope to provide some answers, as well pose a few more questions.

March 25

Cutting across boundaries: Noble aspires to reach a broader audience as she gathers a circle of artists around her to help her reach her goal.

“Those were the two things on the top of the child food chain,” Noble said.

She decided to dance, a choice that continues to reverberate in her artwork.

“I really attribute my connection to sound to motion and dance,” Noble said. “I studied dance for years, and I think that’s really the connection: How do you get things to move?”

The answer is relatively straightforward if you are a DJ, as Noble was in Chicago before returning to San Diego to teach art at High Tech High. It’s essentially a matter of the right beats and the right energy at the right time.

But what if you are creating sound for a multimedia installation comprising hundreds of Victorian-inspired paper dolls hanging from a gallery ceiling, like Noble’s San Diego Foundation-supported work-in-progress, “44th and Landis”?

“It’s the ultimate challenge,” Noble said. “I’m always working with motion, with people moving, whether it’s the puppeteers (as in her collaboration with Animal Cracker Conspiracy in “The Collector”), or dancers (with Leslie Seiters and Lux Boreal in “Fear of Numbers”) or video (with Edyta Stepien in “NonPhenomena”).

“Now I’m like, ‘How can I make these things feel alive?’ I think it may be eerie if it does work, if people look at these paper dolls and start to feel that they are in their world. I don’t know if that’s possible, but that’s what I’m going for.”

Happy accidents

With the visuals and the overall structure for “44th and Landis” pretty much set, Noble is focused on assembling the sound aspects of the ambitious, large-scale work that will fill an entire gallery at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego downtown’s location starting Aug. 9.

“The visual thing was almost identical to how I’m doing the sound,” Noble said. “We sampled images of City Heights, used samples of lithographs and different etchings from Victorian times, and then sampled photographs and pop media from the ’80s.

“We recombined them, synthesized them, refined them and polished them. And just as we’re tuning the sound objects, we tuned the colors. In essence, it’s the same process. … It’s reappropriating things and making them new.”

She’s also created sounds, whether on a synthesizer or by digitally sampling everyday occurrences, such as the sound of a marble rolling through a toy wooden maze, a spinning top, the ripping of paper. Those sounds, like her street samples, can be endlessly manipulated and ultimately assembled into something that moves forward through time.

But how does she know what works and what doesn’t? Is there criteria beyond sheer instinct?

“You have to consider if it’s too heavy, or too light,” Noble said. “There’s a weight to everything you are working with. ‘The Collector’ (her most recent project) was very heavy and intense and dark, and the sound supported that.

“Now, with this project, things are literally made from paper. They are flimsy, they are thin, and they are fragile. So how does the sound support the weight? Not only the physical weight but the emotional weight? And what’s it all about? Does it make sense? It’s tough. Sometimes it makes sense and you go back to it and go, ‘What was I thinking?’

“I hate to say it’s just a feeling, but it is.”

Place and space

As she continues to test, refine and combine, she’s organized her sound assemblages into six segments. Each of the work’s five sections has its own continuous soundtrack. A sixth segment contains sounds that will eventually run through the entire piece.

Each of the sections (which contain multiple suspended elements, including the dolls) has its own specific visual character (dealing with an aspect of growing up near “44th and Landis”), which Noble is working to enhance, enliven and extend through her sound design.

“I’m trying to create a place where you walk in, and there are different places to go and different experiences to have,” Noble said. “What I’m trying to do is make sense of the space.”

One of her primary concerns from the beginning has been to make the piece accessible, to make it “smart without alienating the audience.”

But even more important for Noble is to make it authentic as she incorporates her own eclectic, even quirky, range of influences (from hip-hop to urban soundscapes), interests (Victorian culture to experimental art) and identities (DJ to sound artist) into the piece.

“I’ve always done work like that,” Noble said. “There’s some vintage feeling, simplicity, maybe something eerie, but I also juxtapose it with gnarly synthesizers.”

And music boxes.

She specially ordered a music box that plays the theme of Ms. Pac-Man, which she is sampling for the piece.